


Stories in the Stars

by inkasrain



Category: Star Wars: Bloodline - Claudia Gray
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:16:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8888761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkasrain/pseuds/inkasrain
Summary: Ransolm Casterfo has stories to tell.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [3pipeproblem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/3pipeproblem/gifts).



> Dear 3pipeproblem,
> 
> Happy holidays! I was so happy to be matched with someone who loves Bloodline as much as I do, and I hope I have done Ransolm justice. As Rogue One taught us, hope is never for naught!
> 
> Your Yuletide Author

On his way home to die, Ransolm Casterfo fell back into a childhood habit almost without noticing.

Dropping out of hyperspace, the prison ship descended toward Riosa’s moody surface, juddering beneath patches of gray cloud. The pressure in Ransolm's small cell swelled just slightly, in tandem with the tension in his belly. He swallowed, relieving neither.

He wanted to apologize. He wanted to explain, and have someone listen. He wanted to punch Carise Sindian in the face.

Ransolm paced the tiny bunk, random memories crystallizing against his fear. He forced his gaze through the narrow slat served as a porthole, watching his planet draw closer. The stars shifted and swam through the descent, until suddenly, they coalesced into their familiar patterns. It had been so long since he had been home, since he had watched these stars...

 _There’s Ania_ , he thought, jolted by the memory. _And there’s the gorog_. It was a kind of vertigo, the intense, yearning familiarity; the knowledge that they were still waiting for him.

_There are stories in the stars._

 

* * *

 

 It had started, as so much in his life had, in the work camp.

The noise of the camp never really stopped, and Ransolm couldn’t sleep. Lying in his small pallet bed, his fingers aching with the day’s work, he would twitch with rhythms punched into his young awareness. His mind animated the constant echo of pound and clank and cry. There was no relief; night was nearly as bad as day, the shift from loud to louder barely perceptible as late workers slunk off into a hopeless dawn.  

His sleeplessness was a problem, not only for the ordinary reasons of childhood health and long-term growth. (Such basic hopes, Ransolm realized as he grew older alone, must have seemed like unspeakable dreams to his parents.) As the war ground on and the Empire’s fist weighed heavier on their lives, no one in the work camps — not even a child — could afford to fall asleep on the job.

Spies in the work ranks, desperate for ways out, would notice. The overseers would be informed, or spot the weakness themselves. And if Lord Vader should be near...

Ransolm’s wakefulness was a matter of life and death. 

Desperate, his father tried to ply him with caf. Morning after morning, he stirred precious drops of liquid sugar into the cheap camp brew to coax Ransolm’s tongue to the steaming cup. But even at such a young and fragile age, Ransolm was too stubborn for his own good. The caf wound up spat onto his father’s shirt, or, if swallowed, causing painful stomachaches that worried his mother even more than the insomnia.

“He’s just like you,” Ransolm remembered his father telling his mother, a distant voice blurred by so many years. He hoped, even now, that he hadn’t invented the edge of pride around his father’s words.

“Maybe,” his mother had said. “Maybe."

One night, after pulling on his thin gray pajamas, Ransolm’s mother tucked his arms around her neck, and climbed the narrow ladder that led to the ledge rimming their small turret room. She balanced on the edge, angling her body so that her son could share the view.

“Don’t look down, Ransolm,” she said. “Look up.”  
  
Ransolm tilted his small face to the sky, and saw the stars.

He had seen the stars before, of course, but the fine and grainy soot that wafted so constantly from Riosa’s factories now often dulled the view. And like so many working to exhaustion in the Empire’s surface, Ransolm had already learned that it was often in his best interest to keep his eyes focused downward.

But from the turret, Riosa’s small arc of galaxy was mostly unobstructed. Set against a more beautiful darkness than Ransolm had known existed, the stars seemed to wink and wait, spangling into swirling patterns, into men and women. Into stories.

“There are stories in the stars,” his mother told him. “What do you see?” He remembered the warm echo of her voice in his own chest as he pressed against her back. The focus that took him, multiplied by wonder and possibility.

“There’s a girl,” he had said, pointing toward a curly sweep of stars. “She’s…”

 “Looking for something?”

 “Yes.” Ransolm knew that was right. “She’s looking for… for home. She’s lost.” The noise from the camp still echoed, but his own voice was so much louder now.

“Oh my. And what’s her name?”

He cast around for a moment, and said, “Ania.” His mother’s name.

 She laughed. “Who else is up there, Ransolm?”

“That’s Bowden. And that’s Ograh.” Twins, he decided. He knew a pair of twins in the camp; they smiled at him sometimes. “They’re going to help Ania.”

With his mother’s coaxing, Ransolm spelled out the story, figures forming and melting and coming together again against the vast, sparkling canvas. Ania’s journey to find her father took her through dark, smokey tunnels, the starless spaces in the sky. She was followed by the taskmaster she had escaped (named Ern, coincidentally the same as the man who stalked the rows of workers while Ransolm was on shift.) Thrown into a deep and dirty well, Ania, Bowden, and Ograh had discovered a miraculously expanding  ladder than Anya could keep in her small, gray pocket.

“But the ladder couldn’t help them when…” Ransolm yawned. “They walked into… the cave of…”

“The gorog?” his mother suggested.

“What’s a gorog?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow night,” she said, and reached around to kiss him. She climbed down the ladder and settled him onto the pallet. Ania and the twins and the mysterious gorog still sparkled as he closed his eyes, and the clank and cry of the camp seemed distant, unimportant. With his mind full of stories and stars, Ransolm fell asleep.

* * *

 

Picking out the stories in the stars became a nightly ritual for Ransolm. Ania flitted from adventure to adventure, gaining friends and strength as the nights went by. His mother climbed with him, filling in details, and reminding him amidst battles with monsters and a looming black shadow that Ania was still looking for her home.  

“The story can’t end until she finds it, Ransolm,” his mother would say. Increasingly often, she would cough around her words. One evening before bed, blood came up along with murky phlegm, and Ransolm fled to the turret without her.

When the war ended, and his parents told him that Lord Vader was dead, Ania confronted the shadow. When his parents’ coughing replaced the evil clamor of the factory, he would balance on the window, nursing Ograh and Bowden through dust fever.

Ransolm took the stories with him when his parents died. He hadn’t thought he would, but sleeping on rooftops was safer than the street, and Ania waited for him every time he opened his eyes to the stars. She found a home for Bowden and Ograh and left them behind, crossing mountains and taming the hunger that echoed Ransolm’s own with the wild leaves and berries so awfully scarce on Riosa.

Through years of want and desperation, terror and hopelessness, Ania was there. Ransolm kept her close, and utterly secret. He was too wise already to allow himself to be distracted by stories when survival was at stake, or to lay bare any hint of weakness on the streets. But in quiet moments, he followed her adventures; he toured the stars with her, and took her with him into his dreams.

The story can’t end until she finds her home, he remembered.

Ania remained in a corner of his mind through his years with the Tan’Los family, sheltered in unfamiliar safety. When he returned to Riosa, a man with goals in place of dreams, Ransolm assumed he would not think of her again. But the planetary security force was teeth-numbingly dull. On lonely night shifts, or in the aftermath of pranks on superior officers (it was frankly a miracle he’d ever been elected to the Senate) Ransolm would often find her in the sky.

Her story had changed, as he had. Her hair had grown long, her eyes wilder. His hair was cropped and clean now, his being as refined has he could manage, but still he felt a kinship between himself and the invented girl.

 Ania did not need her home, he realized, as much as her home needed her. And the same was true for Ransolm Casterfo.

 

* * *

 

It was night on Riosa by the time Ransolm was processed and assigned to a cell. He would meet with his representative in the morning, he was told. The guards eyed him with confusion and anger; Ransolm met them with a smile he hoped was understanding. 

Riosa had felt the imprint of the Empire deeply, a reality borne out in ways that one could only see after some time away . Ransolm’s cell was angular and hard, but clean. They had taken his cloak, but let him keep his clothes, and his hands were unbound once inside. The durasteel doors had been replaced with stark bars that gave Ransolm a view of the young guard stationed outside.

The cell also had a small window, lined with bars. The stars winked at him through air cleaner than he remembered. It hasn’t all been for nothing, he thought.

He had, after all, come home. Ania could do the same, crossing a ridge of rippling sand and finding a home that needed her, but could and would survive without her. Someone was still waiting for her; he knew that for certain.

Ransolm Casterfo turned to settle on the narrow cot beneath the star-strewn window, and noticed his guard. The young woman wore a dreamy expression for a fractional moment, before snapping to attention as she noticed him. Just before, her eyes had been fixed on the night sky.

Almost reflexively, Ransolm smiled. _There will_ _always_ , he thought, _be stories in the stars._


End file.
